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PARTISAN REVIEW
tween what most outsiders think the Freudians talk about and the
actual issues they address. Even when discussing such relatively rou–
tine topics as "One Psychoanalysis Or Many," "The Constitutional
Aspects of Dreams," or "Empirical Research on Psychoanalysis and
Psychotherapy," they automatically speak of representations of reali–
ties and the unconscious content and meaning of fantasies rather
than addressing what meets the eye. In fact, they discard more or
less obvious interpretations of the thoughts patients bring to them
and search for hidden, unconscious trauma and defenses. And since
they heal with words rather than medications, many of the contribu–
tions began by criticizing the official translation of
Die endliche und die
unendliche Analyse
as
Analysis Terminable and Interminable.
This render–
ing, some held, lends a pejorative twist: "Analysis Finite and In–
finite" or "The Ending and Unending Analyses" might have been
more appropriate.
In the session on history, the Viennese Harald Leupold–
Lowenthal, for instance, demonstrated that the German words
endlich
and
unendlich
have connotations that are lost in English
translations and in French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese ones as
well- in such words as
terminable, terminee
and
interminable.
For not
only Freud but every student in the German literary and phil–
osophical tradition is familiar with Goethe's couplet :
Willst du ins Unendliche schreiten,
Geh' nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten.
[If
thou wilt step into the infinite,
Just explore every path in the finite .J
In the context of Freud's original paper, Leupold-Lowenthal
explained, both the analyst's and the patient's analyses ultimately
become infinite tasks instead of finite ones . Freud meant that it may
be a good idea for the analyst to undergo a re-analysis every five
years, and he had not talked about the termination or terminability
of a specific analysis. In fact, in 1937, Freud came out for "lengthy"
analyses in order to differentiate himself from Otto Rank - who had
suggested that analyzing the birth trauma might recover uncon–
scious mechanisms within four months .
James Strachey, Freud's official translator, was faulted by Alex
Holder for not having used Freud's annotations and notes from his
original manuscripts. Thus Holder recommended an entirely new
translation to account for Freud's "polyphony." It might even be bet-
